10 September 2012

There
may be several reasons for you not to go and see Reasons to be Pretty running this autumn at The English Theatre,
Hamburg, but the acting should not be one of them. Jed Shardlow, Madeleine Hutchins,
Chris Casey and Gabrielle Douglas all act with intensity in a play and serving
a script that is undeserving of their abilities.

Steph
(played by Madeleine Hutchins) reacts furiously when she hears from her friend
Carly that Steph’s partner, Greg, had described her face as, ‘regular.’ Carly
had overheard this statement, part of a conversation between Carly’s husband,
Kent, and Greg. This single, ‘regular’ provides the main textual motivation
behind the one-hundred minutes of theatre that follow. It spurs Steph onto
ending her relationship with Greg, and to finding a new marriage partner who
will say exclusively those things about her appearance that her fetishism of
her own body demands.

That
this plot contrivance is in itself unconvincing is beside the point. It’s
rather how this device is blindly used to attempt to force a message that the
play as a whole is refusing to carry.

The action closes with Greg telling us in a soliloquy how he’s
done penance for his ‘regular’ faux-pas, how he now’s learnt something
essential about human interaction: “what does it take to be nice? Hardly
anything at all.” Yet all significant deeds in the play we’ve just seen have
had nothing to do with the virtue of niceness. Justifying breaking up a
long-term, fairly successful relationship on the pretext of a single, tactless
comment made by your partner. Starting an affair when your wife – who you’re
strongly sexually attracted to – is eight months pregnant. Finding the
will-power to end a best-friendship after years of knowing your best-friend’s a
bullying yob. All zero-niceness actions. The zero location being pretty much
where Greg’s personable, closing plea floats off to, unable to connect itself
with anything we’ve just seen, or imagined seeing.